This journal will be a spot for me to comment about the world of ophthalmics and medical lasers. I intend to publish some of the more than 150 articles and columns that I have written on these subjects.
In addition, I will report on the latest information on new drugs and devices for the treatment of retinal diseases, including age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

Friday, June 12, 2009

Menu – Part 13: A Few Updates and Some New Posts

Since the last menu posting, I have added two updates for AMD; a new approach for treating myopia with femtosecond lasers; a list of my private client studies while at Arthur D. Little and with Spectrum Consulting; revisited thermal keratoplasty as a technique for treating myopia; and posted two columns, one on my early contact lens days written for Vision Monday and the second on cast-molded eyeglass lenses, done for Ocular Surgery News.

David Williams and his team at the Center for Visual Sciences at the University of Rochester came up with a method of visualizing RPE cells in the retina in vivo, using adaptive optics. This could be a breakthrough in understanding how drugs and other treatments for AMD effect these important cells in the retina.

In this posting, I summarized some of the important techniques and technologies under development in the treatment of AMD – including the Ellex 2RT retinal regeneration technique; the potential use of stem cells to regenerate healthy retinal tissue by two research efforts; and a recap of the visualization techniques described in AMD Update 4 that could play an important role in showing the changes in RPE cells affected by some of these techniques.

Dr. Rupal Shah, responding to my history of ISA*, told me of her research in using a femtosecond laser to form and remove a lenticle in the corneal stroma to correct myopia. She kindly allowed me to reproduce a report she had written on her research, describing her use of the Zeiss-Meditec VisuMax femtosecond laser in the FLEx technique (Femtosecond Lenticle Extraction).* Intrastromal Ablation: A Technology Whose Time Has Come?

In addition to the hundreds of articles and columns written over my 30-plus years of consulting, I led over 100 client-sponsored studies, covering a variety of topics. In this posting I have listed the titles of most of the reports I either wrote or was in charge of producing.

In reading about the work being done by John Marshall and his colleagues at King’s College in London, as well as by old friend David Muller with his new company Avedro, in trying to use microwave energy to flatten the cornea to correct myopia, I was reminded that I had written about earlier attempts do the same thing with a variety of thermal techniques. I looked up the column I had written for Ophthalmology Management in October 1990 and decided it was time to reproduce it on the web.

In searching for the columns I had written for Vision Monday back in the early 1990s, I came across this piece that described my early history with soft contact lenses. Again, I decided that it should be available online for contact lens historians and researchers, so I posted it to my online Journal.

I recently heard from a couple of old friends back from my contact lens days. They are starting a new company, QSpex Technologies, to produce ophthalmic lenses in an eye care professional’s office. I had done some consulting work on in-office plastic lens molding in the early 1990s and had also studied the high-index plastic lens business. I wrote about one of the innovative in-office lens molding companies in an Ocular Surgery News Technical Update column in 1993, and my friends were wondering if I still had a copy of the column. I managed to find it and have reproduced it on my Journal.

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About Me

Until my retirement in 2005, I was a consultant to the ophthalmic industry for over 30 years, and to the medical laser industry for over 20 years.
I was with Arthur D. Little for 25 years and ran my own consulting company, Spectrum Consulting for 11 years, including publishing the monthly newsletter, Executive Laser Briefing.